A Singularly Marine & Fabulous Produce: The Cultures of Seaweed is on now through Dec. 3 at The New Bedford Whaling Museum.
Luis Hernandez: How did you become interested in this? Why seaweed for an exhibit?
Naomi Slipp: Most people, when I mentioned what our big show is right now, they go, “Seaweed? Ugh.” There were two reasons that I think. Seaweed made for a really interesting exhibition or, or kind of piqued our curiosity as a project to explore in an exhibition. The first one was because we are very lucky to have an extraordinary painting in our collection. It’s a really large work painted by a local artist, local to the New Bedford area, who pictures seaweed gathering in France.
I think the other thing is exactly what you hit upon. There are so many kind of cultural traditions that are core to sort of southern New England … ones that maybe we take for granted, like the clam bake or you know, even I know so many people that rake seaweed and put it in their garden beds.
The coastal heritage, the coastal history of this place really means that seaweed has been sort of a significant part of that story for a really long time and made it feel like it would be an interesting sort of thread to explore. And then I think the third thing, as we started to get into the project, was there are so many contemporary projects right now studying seaweed and looking at seaweed as an answer to many of the kind of key critical issues that we’re facing today. And so being able to explore the history and then kind of think about how today seaweed was being utilized to answer things like global food scarcity or climate change or the changes in our coastal waterways, like that felt like a really interesting kind of environmental angle that we could look at and bring the story up to the present.
Hernandez: Describe a couple of the pieces. Because I know you have like paintings, you have ceramics, you’ve got a wide variety of things.
Slipp: It ranges from really extraordinary silver examples of silver from the New York Yacht Club and from the private Tiffany company collection. Which really show how, like, the most elite material, silver, right, this sort of over the top, expensive, decorative art form really reveled in picturing seaweed to things like this enormous piece of housing insulation that was produced sometime around 1900 and was found inside of a house in the Connecticut area. And it was commercially manufactured and sold and they found that kind of housing insulation as far away as California, but it was made in the Boston area. We’ve got, as you noted, lots of tablewares, china, serving dishes. There’s wallpaper. There’s textiles, there’s photography.
Hernandez: Is it true, I think I saw like a coat made of seaweed or something like that?
Slipp: There is not clothing in the exhibition but there is fabric and there are clothes that have been known to be made from seaweed. There’s a sculpture, which maybe is what you’re thinking about, there’s a sculpture out on the plaza that’s cast in bronze. And it’s a contemporary artist named Celeste Roberge who works in the Portland area. And she created a sweater entirely out of seaweed, mostly rockweed, the seaweed with like the kind of, you know, air bubbles.
And it’s a full size, life size sweater entirely of seaweed. And her project is sort of thinking about like, what will we need to adapt to in the face of climate change and sort of rising seas? What kind of clothing will people wear in the future? And in this case It’s seaweed.
Hernandez: In neighboring Rhode Island, collecting seaweed is a protected shoreline right under the Constitution. And that history obviously has directly influenced the new shoreline access law signed by the governor earlier this year. What do you think that says about the importance of seaweed to the region where, you know, I mean, it’s in the Constitution. It’s now, it’s forcing us to create laws today.
Slipp: It’s really curious, I think, the way that when you start looking at seaweed, you start recognizing how much, especially for states like us that are so coastal, how much the kind of privatization of land or questions about public access or our belief in what should be public and what should be private is, in part, yes, enshrined by law, but then also, in part, something of like the heritage of that space, right? I found it fascinating digging into this project, how different the laws are in Massachusetts and Maine about coastal access.
And it’s because Massachusetts and Maine have that conjoined history, right? They were originally one territory. Right next door, Rhode Island has really liberal, and increasingly now, more liberal rules about shoreline access. But Maine and Massachusetts, it’s really restricted.
Got a question, comment or suggestion for Artscape? Email us at arts@thepublicsradio.org.
